


Owner

by Orianne (morganya)



Category: Whose Line Is It Anyway? RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-19
Updated: 2005-09-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:26:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/Orianne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan has a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Owner

He first noticed it two weeks after he moved in. He was making chicken curry in the kitchen, which was ten times bigger than what he needed, a vast expanse of metal and cherrywood. He had just checked on the tomatoes frying in the pan and reached into the cabinet for the spices. When he shut the cabinet door, he noticed a dark stain on the front.

_Great. Two weeks and it's already falling apart._

He tossed the spices into the pan and rubbed at the stain with his sleeve. It was darker than mildew, cold and slick. It was only when he took a step back from it that he realized it was a pair of eyes.

They were dark, hungry eyes, staring blankly at him. Ryan traced them with his fingers and they faded away like steam on a mirror, leaving just the glossy tan wood. The pan boiled over on the stove; the spices smelled burnt and rancid.

He'd come to expect ghosts. At his last place, he would wake up hearing footsteps in an empty house. It scared him a little, but he eventually became familiar with it, enough to joke about: "Oh, that's just Lee, getting his exercise."

This ghost was bolder; after the eyes appeared on the cabinet, he started to wake up feeling someone sitting at the foot of his bed. It would only stay for a second or two, and then it would rise and leave. After a while, it took the place of his alarm clock.

He didn't tell Pat or the kids, not wanting to scare them. He called them every week, keeping Daddy's adventures with poltergeists far away from his conversation topics. Instead he told them about the pool and all the rooms and how he would decorate them any way they wanted when they came down. Sam seemed offended when he didn't know more about the house's previous owner, a makeup artist for high budget monster movies, so Ryan lied and told him about all the latex masks and fake blood that had been lying around the house, how he'd had to donate it to Monsters Anonymous to keep it from going to waste.

"So there's really nothing?" Sam said suspiciously.

"Nope. Sorry about that."

"Aw."

"Let me talk to Mom, okay, bud?"

"Okay. Bye, Dad."

"I love you," Ryan prompted.

"Love you," Sam said dutifully and was gone.

Pat came on sounding tired but basically fine. "So the house is really okay?"

"Yep," Ryan said. Out of the corner of his eye he could see one of the windows in the kitchen sliding up and down. "How are you doing up there? How's the baby?"

"All right." He could picture Pat by the phone. She would be showing more now than the last time he'd seen her, her belly curving softly outward. She said, "I feel like a cliché. Standing in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant."

"I'm in the kitchen," Ryan said. "I'll take my shoes off if it'll make you feel better."

She laughed. "When will you come back up here?"

"Sometime this summer, it looks like. I'm getting everything settled."

"The kids miss their dad."

"It'll be soon."

She paused. "I was thinking about doing some administrative stuff for the school. A couple days a week, some extra money."

"No," he said.

"Ryan, it's not…I'm _sick_ of being in this house by myself. I'm going to lose my mind."

"Honey, if you need anything, I'll wire it up to you. Besides, you don't need to be on your feet all day. Doctor's orders."

"Oh, doctors…"

"Maybe you could take a class or something if you need to get out. Call Sheryl, do whatever…"

"Ryan..."

"'A man takes care of his family,'" Ryan said, in a fair imitation of his father.

"You do take care of us. But you don't need…"

"I do," he said quietly.

"I wish you were here."

"Soon," he said. "Soon."

He hung up, looked around the kitchen. It was probably time to get dinner ready. He started towards the refrigerator. After he shut the door, pork tenderloin balanced precariously in his hands, he noticed that there was a place for him at the kitchen table that he hadn't set.

The kids wouldn't tell him how they wanted their rooms decorated; they were too wrapped up in school to concentrate on how they wanted rooms that they hadn't seen yet to look, so he held off on doing anything at all, for now. He held off on really doing anything to any of the other rooms, because he thought he should probably talk with Pat before ripping out any carpet or painting the walls. He supposed that they still shared enough of each other's taste for him to do it alone, but he didn't like shopping by himself.

He started calling the ghost Evelyn, if only to himself. One morning he found the clothes in his closet organized by color, which Pat used to do and which had always struck him as a feminine gesture. He picked the name Evelyn because it sounded safe to him, like a good-natured, middle-aged woman who knitted scarves. He figured if he ever let her name slip, he could tell people she was the housekeeper.

He had told people about Lee, complained about him. But Evelyn was attuned to him in a way Lee hadn't been. She reacted to him. It seemed familiar somehow. When he had people over to the house, she hid from them, the way Mac used to do when she was four years old and feeling shy. When his friends left, she returned, coming to stand by his shoulder, silent and unseen but very much present.

He sometimes tried to picture her, but all he could come up with was an image of dark, hungry eyes.

"When are you going to open the place up?" Drew asked him on the set. "You spent all that money on it, you should at least slap a coat of paint."

"Yeah. Sure, Drew. I practically used up my kids' college fund buying the fucker in the first place, I think I'd like to save some money up before I redo it. At least there's no pink carpeting."

"Well, yeah, but all those empty rooms, man. You've been there what, four months?"

"Five."

"I go over there and I expect to sit on milk crates."

"Ambience."

"Ambience, my ass. It's like a ghost town."

 _You don't know the half of it._ Ryan shrugged. "I'll probably get it fixed up next year sometime. If I'm the only one there, I don't really need to worry about it."

Drew scowled. Drew was fascinated by the thought of having money, of being able to buy whatever you liked without consequences. It upset him when someone didn't partake of that philosophy. "Maybe your wife could send some shit down. At least make it look like somebody lives there."

"Somebody does live there, Drew. I've got it just the way I like it. My wife doesn't need to kill herself hauling sofas around."

"You know, if there's anything wrong, anything I can do…"

" _Nothing_ is _wrong_ ," Ryan said.

Drew looked hurt. "Well, excuse the fuck out of me."

Ryan shrugged lamely at him.

"You need to get out," Drew said decisively. "Go somewhere, do something."

"What is there to do?"

"We're flying out to Bahrain next month. You should come. Brownie points."

"I think I'd rather pass."

"It's unpatriotic."

"If you were playing in San Diego, I'm as patriotic as they get. On a plane? I'm not."

Break was over. Drew stood. "We'll do something."

"Yeah, okay."

He went home and found that his bed had been moved to the other side of the room. There were scratches on the floor where it had been pulled. He laid his hands on the bedposts and wondered if he should try to put it back the way it was.

His friend Matt was bringing a group over to the house for poker. Ryan set up a table in the living room. He could feel Evelyn hovering around the corners, gusts of cold air rushing by his face as she passed him. He ignored her.

Poker night had a specific tone to it: music, alcohol and salty food, all placed at strategic locations around the room. He put Bruce Springsteen on the stereo. As soon as he pushed the play button, cold air ran up his spine. The music stopped. He put it back on. It stopped again. He put it back on. The doorbell rang before she could turn it off again.

She fled immediately, leaving him with chattering teeth, the hair standing up along his neck. He went to answer the door.

Matt, as usual, had arrived already half-drunk, accompanied by an entourage comprised of people Ryan was barely acquainted with and didn't bother to remember. They were just bodies to fill the chairs.

He showed them around the downstairs perfunctorily, let them run around the wine cellar and peer at the pool. When Matt complimented him, saying it looked like the Playboy Mansion, he shrugged and laughed it off.

When they finally settled down to play poker, Ryan turned the stereo up loud. Evelyn was breaking from her previous plan of hiding while he had guests; he could hear noises from upstairs. His kids used to do the same thing when he and Pat had company; they were furious at being exiled from any activity. He wondered if he could excuse himself, go upstairs and shout, "That is _enough_ , Evelyn," threaten to withhold her allowance, ground her, anything to make her shut the fuck up for two seconds.

"What's that noise? You got a girl up there?" Matt said.

"Old house. Boards settling," Ryan said. He lit a cigarette.

One of Matt's friends, a large, swarthy man whose name was either Clark or Mark, said, "Bet you've got a whole bunch of girls up there. A hooker convention."

Ryan shrugged. "Yeah. A whole convention. Straight off Sunset."

He could deal with this. He could go on automatic and respond as need be, be funny if he wanted, be quiet if he wanted. Above him, it sounded as if someone was throwing a chair against the wall.

"That's starting to freak me out," Matt said, dealing the next hand. "I thought you got rid of your ghost."

"I did. Boards," Ryan said. "Very loud boards."

The liquor ran out at five in the morning. Evelyn had gone quiet. He offered Matt and company use of the floor, but Matt said, "I think we'd rather stay somewhere that has beds," which was the cue for everyone to stagger out. Ryan was relieved.

He went upstairs to his room. The door to the bathroom was swinging open and closed, as though Evelyn were hanging off of it.

"I want my house back," Ryan said.

 _Not your house. Never has been_. He wasn't sure who thought that.

He could say, "I live here, for Christ's sake," but that wasn't really true. He wasn't sure where he lived.

The door kept swinging open and closed. He put his hand up to stop the swinging. Evelyn pushed him out of the way, a light tap, really, just showing him who was boss.

She'd never belonged to him. Not his house, not his ghost, not his life.

Ryan turned away. He stared out the window and listened to the hinges squeak, wishing he could cry.


End file.
